After all, you’d never want people to start farming humans, right? So why agree that it’s okay once it starts?
There are perfectly good circumstances to start farming animals, like when your survival depends on it. I suspect that there could be a similar situation with farming humans (or at least process them into Soylent Green). Other that that, I agree on the status quo bias.
Re slavery:
Yes, this obvious analogy occurred to me. I would feel more urgency to reevaluate my ethical system if I considered farm animals my equals. Your reasons for doing so may differ. Presumably the emancipation was in part based on that reason, in part on compassion or other reasons, I am not an expert in the subject matter.
Ethical/moral objections aside, initiating the practice of human farming wouldn’t be a logical or practical choice, as presumably farm-rearing humans would be just as energy-inefficient as farm-rearing livestock:
Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein, according to the Cornell ecologist’s analysis.
Killing and eating excess humans in the process of reducing the world’s population to a sustainable level, on the other hand, might qualify as a logical use of resources.
There are perfectly good circumstances to start farming animals, like when your survival depends on it. I suspect that there could be a similar situation with farming humans (or at least process them into Soylent Green). Other that that, I agree on the status quo bias.
Re slavery:
Yes, this obvious analogy occurred to me. I would feel more urgency to reevaluate my ethical system if I considered farm animals my equals. Your reasons for doing so may differ. Presumably the emancipation was in part based on that reason, in part on compassion or other reasons, I am not an expert in the subject matter.
Ethical/moral objections aside, initiating the practice of human farming wouldn’t be a logical or practical choice, as presumably farm-rearing humans would be just as energy-inefficient as farm-rearing livestock:
Killing and eating excess humans in the process of reducing the world’s population to a sustainable level, on the other hand, might qualify as a logical use of resources.